Dec. 22, 1906.I 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
99 1 
KENESAW II.—OUTBOARD PROFILE. 
Boston Letter. 
This being the season of Christmas tide when 
men of all sorts, the bow-legged, bandy-legged, 
straight-legged and knock-kneed, stretch their in¬ 
dividual limbs to the warmth of the blazing yule- 
log, sip each his favorite brand of liquor, and 
converse through the blue haze of good tobacco 
smoke. I shall discard the mantle of a news- 
purveyor and make bold to tell a story. Not a 
ghost story or a fairy story; yet I hardly have 
the assurance to call it a true story, for it rests 
upon no more solid foundation than the glean¬ 
ings from old men’s memories of their grand¬ 
father’s gossip; a hint given me here, a hint 
there; now the skeptical recital of a village tra¬ 
dition, and now the result of my own addition, 
subtraction and division of water-front anecdotes; 
but still a story, a wee. wisp of a story, the 
Genesis of the Catboat. 
Once upon a time, many, many years ago, when 
yacht designers were as unknown as were yachts, 
and when naval architecture was but a dandyfield 
full of governmental departments, men built boats 
as their fathers had before them. The fisherman 
handed on his tiny ship to his fishersons. Were 
they too numerous for one boat to suffice them 
all, the occasional new boat was built. The 
model of these little barks, punts, smacks or 
yawls, whatever local usage termed them, was 
always that of the favored type of the locality 
from which the fisherman, or his forebears, first 
came to till the soil and bait the fish of a new 
world. The boats of old England were not 
readily adaptable to the waters of New England, 
the resources of a struggling colony were seldom 
equal to reproducing exactly the models of the 
mother country, but tradition was mighty and 
innovation of dangerous expediency. Thus, for 
generations, the hardy folk of Cape Cod’s south 
coast worked the shallow depths of the adjacent 
waters in craft ill suited tO' prevailing conditions. 
In those days the sturdy men of the little ham¬ 
let on West Bay were fishing farmers. Plowing 
the land in early spring, plowing the sea from 
March until December, they wrung a bare living 
from a soil ever-becoming more sandy, from the 
oyster beds of their bay and from the tide-riven, 
wind-swept sounds beyond the harbor bar. Each 
at first his own boat builder, but with the slowly- 
;,growing population ever tending to the concen¬ 
tration of occupations ever ripening for the 
moment for some man. or family, to control by 
preeminent fitness some one trade, some one voca¬ 
tion. The most thrifty, the most hospitable, had 
become respectively the keeper of the village store 
and of the village inn. But all remained fellers 
of trees, hewers of timber, contrivers of construc¬ 
tion—the builders of their own boats; the faithful 
mimics of their predecessors’ loyalty to the old 
